The Chaser Report - WAR STORIES: Chris's Realistic Wish Foundation

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

This Summer The Chaser Report presents... WAR STORIES! Chris Taylor returns to the studio for our Summer Stunt Series to talk about all the old Chaser TV shows and some of his favourite and least-favourite moments. This episode features that time Chris divorced his wife on TV, that time he wore a stocking on his head, and… the most controversial sketch of all. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Welcome to another summer edition of The Chaser Report, Charles Firth and I, Dom Nader, talking to Chaser colleagues about the old TV show that we used to make, some of the war stories, as we're calling them, from behind the scenes of shows like CNN and N and the Chases were on everything in the election specials. Chris Taylor is at the microphone today once again. Hello, Chris. Hello, how are you guys? All right. That was the most tepid response. I had to think about it.

I was just making small talk by other. I didn't care how you are. I was literally just domped through to me. What are I meant to say? I just had to, I just ponded. And I thought, well, no, we're not. The great thing about this series is we're looking back at the past when there was no COVID and no Omicron and no ICU rate soaring.

So we're not talking about how am I. I'm terrible, but that's not about what this podcast is about. Let's talk about what it used to be. I didn't actually have any interest in your health. I was just making a pleasant. century. You just meant to say, oh, I'm all right. Now, we're talking to know you about, like...

Well, I did eventually. We're broken men. Now I feel I am interested in your health. Because by your response, I'm wondering if something seriously wrong, and you've got four hours to live. Yes, probably. The Chaser Report, less news, less often. Now, Chris, can I throw something at you here,

which is that we talked last time about where can you take a horse? but on that same strip of shops near the ABC was one of your most famous stunts because he didn't do that many but some of the ones you did were very memorable and I want to talk about because Chas already raised it the stocking heads incident because that was one of the most extraordinary things

that we did in terms of the TV impact people really talked about that so Chris there was a bit of a debate in the team I remember about whether everything that happened on the show should have been exactly how it was presented as real as it presented but some of your most memorable moments and the sunrise clip

which was absolutely brilliant and stocking heads were things where there was a little bit of set up and when you think about it it would make sense that it would have to have been set up but I remember you saying look it's a comedy show what matters is that it's a funny premise and I think you won that debate in the forms of time

what's your recollection of all that conversation now I'm very aware how disappointed everyone always was with that sunrise one which is where I divorced my wife live on air on sunrise with Koshy. Well, Chris, great to see you. Thanks for joining us. Say hello to the boys for it. Especially so early, thanks for coming in.

No, my pleasure. And can I just do one big thing before we go? We go out live here, don't we? Yeah, yeah. My partner, Joe, never misses the show at all. Oh, that's nice. She absolutely loves it. And I just know she'll be watching today.

So can I just put a message out to her? Oh, go away. We've been together for seven years. And I just want to take this opportunity now live on TV. to say, Joe, get the fuck out of my life. You sure yet? Have you texted about it? I've tried, I've done everything I can, Koshy.

So if you don't get the fucking message now, Joe, you never will. Okay. Thanks. It's 90 minutes. First of all, like, I wasn't married at the time. So Joe does not exist. But the, even me pretending to divorce Joe live on sunrise didn't actually go out live on sunrise.

It was filmed with the cooperation of the show. They didn't know what I was going to say. So it's sort of an improvised moment. But it was off air and they played along quite well. But it was presented as live, I guess. I understand why people are disappointed when they learn that didn't really happen. Because for them, the excitement of that clip is the audaciousness. Because I swear on Channel 7, I seem to have tricked commercial TV into being.

a guinea pig in my piece. But for me, none of that was really integral to the laugh. It was just a comedy idea. It was based on that notion about public proposals, where people often, you know, at baseball games, proposed to their wife or people hang up banners on highways. And it was an opposite sketch where I did all of those things, but I did it for wanting to ask for a divorce instead of a marriage.

So for me, that was just, that worked as a comedic idea. It didn't matter if it was real or not. And I still believe that. I still think if you had the knowledge that it was all just like traditional sketch show but shot using famous people like Kosh and Mel, I think you'd still get a laugh. But the problem with by that stage the chaser, because most of what we did was real, it became very ambiguous about what stunts were real and what were kind of manipulated a bit. And I guess as Dom said, this did become a source of some tension in the group.

because there were those of us that just thought, if it's comedically strong, it doesn't matter. We're just making a comedy show. And the same way that every sketch show before us as manipulated actors and stuff to make their scripts sing, we were doing the same. But because there was the ambiguity that, you know,

50% of what we did was genuine interactions with real people, then it got grey about what were the ones that sort of sat in between. We had a word for it. And did it dilute? I mean, isn't the. point that it sort of dilutes the impact of the real ones if you've got these fake ones mixed in where, and suddenly it sort of feels like, oh, is it all staged? I think that was the thing.

Like, I remember Chas being, you know, as regular listeners to this podcast, but I had a lot of views about this and a lot of theories and sort of understood where I was coming from, but also was probably very careful about protecting the show's integrity. Yes. Because, yeah. Integrity. Because if, you know, if word sort of gets out that something like the sunrised in is fake, then maybe is APEC faked.

Yeah, yeah. And the answer to that is no. We draw an internal line that one is a soft comedy sketch about, you know, a play on public proposals. The other is a genuine gotcha about an over-the-top security operation in Sydney. Because my thing was always, there's a playfulness in the uncertainty anyway. Like playing with whether things. a sort of true

or not is part of a satirist toolbox, isn't it? Yeah, and it's also, there is no such thing as real with the chaser, because when you go out on a stunt, the thing that the viewer sees is you very bravely walking up to someone by yourself. They don't see

the producers, the multiple cameras, the sound eye, or the safety officer. It's much less brave than it looks at every point in the entire series. So I don't know, I don't know what real even means. in the context of this, but it's certainly true that I, at the time, I think, I was like, oh, I don't really want us to overuse that. But my view was, if you think about it,

you have to realise it couldn't possibly be real. Yeah, and that, I guess, brings us to the stocking head one, which, I mean, there's no way on earth. Any lawyer, but especially a cautious ABC lawyer, would let you go out dressed as a robber and enter shops. I mean, that's just a public risk, public excuse. Terrorism, basically. It's a crime. It probably is a crime to impersonate a robber. Even if you're not robbing, you're still tearing, terrorising the bejesus out of someone. But it's also incredibly dangerous. For both parties, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, if someone draws a gun on me, it's dangerous. So, so, I think I, maybe I, I naively thought everyone would, again, understand that this was more, you know, a flight of fancy that are shot under controlled conditions. But shall we have, should we have a listen? Let's have a listen. Hey there, just the paper and some sherry, thanks. Can you keep up your mask? Oh, no, it's okay, it's fine. It's just cold outside and I...

Not really. Hi there. No, no, no, it's fine. No, it's fine. Hi there. Did you have the new, um, that Peking to Paris book? Excuse me. No, I just want to book a holiday.

No, it's fine. Can't I book a holiday here? Hi there. No, no, no, I just want to... Get out. Sorry. No, I just want to... No, I just want to get some noodles. No, no, I just want some dumplings. No.

Hi there, I noticed a DVD... Well, what the hell is that? No, I just... The DVD in the window. Uh, is that the final price you can offer? No, don't panic, no. I just want to buy a DVD. Leave a second, I'll call the police.

No, it's fine. No, no, no. It's just what I wear. Oh, can you help me, please? I've got a gentleman here. Don't call the police. I'm just a, I'm a regular shopper. Get to myself. Can you come straight away, please?

Get him out of here. You get it out of here. The cock's coming. That's just a funny premise. What if I wore a stocking out of my head as a fashion statement? But I reckon the reactions of some of those people were really funny. Like, because you didn't actually tell them exactly what was going to happen, did you? No, I think in this case, we more or less did and had to legally.

You always want as genuine a response as you can get within the law and within, you know, safety protocols. So what we, it was sort of a shoot in two halves. The first half, we tried to minimise the information and maximise genuine responses. So the crew would always go into the shop ahead of me, like a fixer or a producer. I think it was Nathan Earl on this one who did a lot of our producing and was a, it was a real gun and a real asset on this show. A real smooth talker for this show. He was. And he'd just say, look, we're shooting a TV show. someone's going to come in

I won't tell you much more than that but just react as you would react and that got us somewhere I think so the first couple of bites in that piece are probably those ones then I think it became clear

to us that comedically the responses needed to be bigger and so and we did we just literally coached the responses and just treated this as a sketch because it's very well performed You're a robber They look really fearful

You don't want it to look too real Because then people will just think We're assholes That we've gone around trying to scare people I'm just talking again I'm trying to remember No no but it was the perfect balance Between

Like they weren't petrified And sort of thing But they were They were treating it seriously They were a straight man Yes In the sketch Yeah

And look Look it is funny But again Like the sun Like the sunrise one, you know, whenever, and I'm always very comfortable telling people, you know, that we, that we, a lot of it was staged. Because I think ethically, that's fine to confess how you make your comedy, but also I just think it looks so bad if you did that for real. With this one, definitely. I'd rather be known as someone who slightly manipulates comedy than known as someone who goes around terrorizing innocent shopkeepers.

So, but the fan's response was so disappointing always. Oh, what was it? Well, they always just thought, oh, I only liked that piece because I thought you were actually a cunt. Yeah. The Chaser Report, news you know you can't trust. Didn't it also, I mean, this is not something I thought at the time, but doesn't it also fuck with the premise in hindsight that,

of the chaser that we work to do things for real? And so then we miss with, in our tradition of messing with everything, We mess with our own reputation. Yeah, look, well, it's very meta. But there was a bit of that going on. And I remember, I think everyone laughed at me. I always tried to justify this piece editorially before we get into the ethics of the shoot.

I sort of think it's a piece about judgment based on appearance, like which does happen in society, you know, people with disabilities or people of different ethnicity. People, different responses get, different looks get different responses. And I sort of, it was about stereotype. And I thought that if you take a ridiculous stereotype, like the stereotype of the robber, but what if someone just looked like that,

but wasn't a robber? Like what a terrible way to live. Yeah, if that was a fashion choice, but everywhere he went, he got judged based on his appearance. That was sort of the, you know, there was something kind of like that going on in my head that I was keen to explore. I don't think that comes across necessarily in the piece.

But that was the premise going in. Then it just became, unfortunately, perhaps, or fortunately, depending on how sick your sense of humor is, a piece about scaring the bejesus out of people. But it's, I guess because no one gets hurt, obviously, because it was shot in controlled conditions. Like, I'm just wondering what people who thought that was real actually, what they're finding amusing about that,

other than the assolery of it. It is perverse when you think about it, isn't it? Surely you don't have to think for more than a few seconds. If you actually pond, if you think about the way that the show is made, you realize that we couldn't possibly have been allowed to do that for real? I guess people didn't know, because I think we've mentioned

this in previous podcasts in this series that it was a pretty young audience. Often, yeah. You know, kids are impressionable, and they want to believe that, you know, the chaser were sort of adult avatars of their own disobedience and anti-authority and all of that.

There was a bit of that going on. It was a... Totally. We hate the word, but it was a cheeky, sort of naughty show. And I think they thought, And in a way, I don't know how much you follow sort of what's happening in this space these days on YouTube, but people do go around shooting this kind of stuff for real. Well, maybe it's not for real, and I'm getting hoodwinked. But, like, people, you know, the currency of clicks and views is so high

that you need to do something outrageous to get views these days. Now, we didn't have that pressure back then. You know, as I said, in another podcast, YouTube had either just begun, or it wasn't a big platform for us. ABC was our audience. No, there was almost no YouTube for whatever reason. No, it was just starting. And ABC had a policy of pulling down ABC shows

because they, you know, back, and in fact, the Chaser was one of the first... We were the first show that begged the ABC to keep ours up because people forget when Chaucer's Warren, everything began, it was like 10.30 on Friday nights. It wasn't prime time Wednesday. It was very off-brow. Broadway. The only thing that made the show popular was some of these stunt clips started leaking

on YouTube and we had to beg the ABC to keep them up there because we realized that's where the marketing was. That was the best ad we could possibly have for the show. But otherwise, they wanted to take them all down. Anyway, that's a long tangent of way of saying, we didn't have the expectation or the need to do shock content. And I always get a bit upset as I think all of us do when you saw the show described as deliberately shocking and that we'd take delight in outrage and all of that. We really genuinely did just want to make a comedy show and stuff it with as many jokes and laughs and different comedic sensibilities as possible.

I don't think anyone ever really attended a writer's meeting saying, I want to cause an outrage this week. I don't think any comedian does. And we try to avoid it because there's nothing good about outraging people. It just puts a handbrake on production. It's just a big distraction to deal with. I can't help but remember, Chris, with all this discussion about what's really and what isn't, that I think with the make-a-wish situation with the big controversy that came in this series,

part of the problem with that was that they thought it was done for real, that they thought that our teams had gone into an actual children's ward and offered them a stick, whereas, in fact, of course, it was set up with young actors. I only learned this recently, too. And yet, because people thought, oh, they always do things for real, they thought we'd bravely or horribly wanted to do a children's ward and started, you know, Picking on kids. Yeah, no, I didn't realize that at the time.

I thought there were just genuine editorial concerns about, you know, the comedy of that piece. But, yeah, there was a show on the ABC recently called Reputation Rehab that did something of a deep dive into outrage comedy and with a case study on that sketch. And they got a focus group of people who hadn't seen it back in the day. They hadn't heard of The Chase or anything. And, yeah, they, for a start... Well, they played the whole episode. They had to play the whole... They played the whole episode,

and they asked the panel to guess which sketch was the one that caused huge controversy, and no one... They went through six, at least six others before they arrived at the Make-A-Wish one. And there are only six other... We thought the Oscar Bates sketch was going to... If anything was going to destroy us.

It was one where Andrew gets all my left foot was one that was going to cause trouble. So even we couldn't... Even if we'd wanted to outrage people, we had no idea what the reaction was going to be. And the audience, 400 people watched that or something like that in the studio. And none of them came out saying, oh, I think that one was a bit spicy.

No. And look, so these things are hard to predict. And, you know, but I think the point I was making was also in that Reputation Rehab show. In addition to none of the focus group guessing what was the controversial sketch, once they were asked to address it, they all assumed they were real, patience, which does make it, obviously makes it icky

and the minute they knew it it was actors, they go, oh, well that's just a black comedy sketch. So I guess in hindsight, people thinking it was real or didn't work for us and sometimes it worked against us, Chris. I think so. And look, you know, as anyone who works in comedy knows,

these things are incredibly subjective and one person's view is another person's exact opposite view. And it's always, well, it's always impossible to make a show that's universally loved. But I think the beauty of a show like The Chasesboro and everything was it did represent a pretty broad range of senses of humor because the team members had quite different senses of humor. Yeah. It was amazing how unified the show was given how different we were in our sensibilities. I think we're all, you know, we all come from reasonably similar backgrounds.

but it was, you know, there were the diehard satirists and then there were those of us that preferred doing silly dress-ups and wearing fake moustaches and doing voices. And I think, you know, people like Andrew and I, when asked to do stunts, look for a way to bring our sketch, our love of sketch into stunt world, rather than just slavishly sort of doing the Craig or Julian chasing Johnny Howard type pieces.

So it's, yeah, it's interesting to talk about because it's, and I've sort of watched a lot of so-called guerrilla comedy or real-world comedy recently, and there's some excellent, I think, Nathan for you, is, I think, the best show in this space. But even when I watch that, having made a show like The Chaser, I can spot little instances, not many in his case, but there are instances where you can see the hand of the producer, just manipulate things a little to get a desired comic effect. And it's fine. I'm completely fine with it.

It's no different to manipulating drama. It's just, you know, you do what you do to maximise your laugh. And we edit. That's the other thing. If you watch the rushes of some of these stunts, you wouldn't find them funny at all, or at least very occasionally, because we made the show funny in the edit in many cases, didn't we?

Oh, completely. And, you know, half the cutaways in the chaser are of people that aren't responding to the theme they look to be responding to. They are in the same location. They're not taken from an entirely different shoot. but they're sandwiched into an edit to create a more pleasing and funny sequence and that's the business of, you know, making TV

and it's, as we've sort of canvassed, we'd made a rod for our back by presenting a lot of the stuff for real because it was for real, but then it just, yeah, it just becomes a little bit greyer when it comes to those bits that were just pure comedy pieces rather than pure stunts. Well, Chris, next time we chat to you

We'll be with Craig Roocastle as well. We'll catch you then. See you then. Our gears from road microphones. We're part of the ACAST CRATA Network. I've got a new one of these episodes every day during this January.